nightsoil

JAPAN

It was a miniature country once
To my imagination;
Home of the Short,
And also the academy of stunts
Where acrobats are taught
The famous secrets of the trade:
To cycle in the big parade
While spinning plates
upon their parasols,
Or somersaults that do not touch the ground,
Or tossing seven balls
In Most Celestial Order round and round.

A child's quick sense of the ingenious stamped
All their invention:
toys I used to get
At Christmastime,
or the peculiar, cramped
Look of their alphabet.
Fragile and easily destroyed,
Those little boats of celluloid
Driven by camphor around the bathroom sink,
And delicate the folded paper prize
Which, dropped into a drink
Of water, grew up right before your eyes.

Now when we reached them it was with a sense
Sharpened for treachery compounding in their brains
Like mating weasels;
our Intelligence
Said: The Black Dragon reigns
Secretly under yellow skin,
Deeper than dyes of atabrine
And deadlier. The War Department said:
Remember you are Americans; forsake
The wounded and the dead
At your own cost; remember Pearl and Wake.

And yet they bowed us in
with ceremony,
Told us what brands of Sake
were the best,
Explained their agriculture
in a phony
Dialect of the West,
Meant vaguely to be understood
As a shy sign of brotherhood
In the old human bondage to the facts
Of day-to-day existence. And like ants,
Signaling tiny pacts
With their antennae, they would wave their hands.

At last we came to see them not as glib
Walkers of tightropes, worshipers of carp,
Nor yet a species out of Adam's rib
Meant to preserve its warp
In Cain's own image. They had learned
That their tough eye-born goddess burned
Adoring fingers. They were very poor.
The holy mountain was not moved to speak.
Wind at the paper door
Offered them snow out of its hollow peak.

Human endeavor clumsily betrays
Humanity. Their excrement served in this;
For, planting rice in water, they would raise
Schistosomiasis
Japonica, that enters through
The pores into the avenue
And orbit of the blood, where it may foil
The heart and kill, or settle in the brain.
This fruit of their nightsoil
Thrives in the skull, where it is called insane.

Now the quaint early
image of Japan
That was so charming
to me as a child
Seems like a bright
design upon a fan,
Of water rushing wild
On rocks that can be folded up,
A river which the wrist can stop
With a neat flip, revealing merely sticks
And silk of what had been a fan before,
And like such winning tricks,
It shall be buried in excelsior.

Anthony Hecht

Copyright © Anthony Hecht

(On leaving Germany, he spent some time in Japan, generating news copy to portray the occupying American forces in a favorable manner. “It was quite shameless, hypocritical work,” he said, “and therefore perfectly consistent with everything I had ever known about the Army.” ) 1

[with thanks to 'anonymous' who mentioned this poem]

the blossom flies

we have spoken earlier of the echoing, in the birth of japonisme, of nature's related forms. of course this recognition didn't start in the west:

in around 1400, moritake arakida wrote:

The fallen blossom
flies back to its branch:
A butterfly. 1

in 1820, issa wrote:

.遠山が目玉にうつるとんぼ哉
tôyama ga medama ni utsuru tombo kana

the distant mountain
reflected in his eyes...
dragonfly

david lanoue writes: Issa sees a vast mountain (or mountains) miniaturized in the tiny bubble-eyes of the dragonfly.

Just as his English contemporary, William Blake, glimpsed a universe in a grain of sand, Issa perceives the great in the small: a mountain in the twin mirrors of an insect's mirror eyes.

The power of this image cannot be fully explained; with it, the poet coaxes the reader into a deep contemplation of the nature, and interconnectedness, of all things.

also from 1820 is issa's:

.蜻蛉も紅葉の真ねや竜田川
tombô mo momiji no mane ya tatsuta-gawa

a dragonfly copies
the red leaves...
Tatsuta River 2

more recently, in 1919, amy lowell wrote:

Is it a dragonfly or a maple leaf
That settles softly down upon the water?

one western artist was known to take most deeply to heart the teachings of the japanese. his name was lucien gaillard. as was written about him during his lifetime, "Lucien Gaillard is ever on the look-out for that which is fresh and novel. As gold-worker and jeweller he has been fore- most among the most resolute supporters of the modern decorative art.

At first the jewels he produced were somewhat complicated and distorted, but now he has attained to greater wisdom and greater simplicity, this evolution being the result of serious and patient study of the Japanese masters.

He has been at great pains also to recover the secret of the marvellous oxidations on the bronzes of the Far East, and he has succeeded therein. He has lately shown some hair-pins and small-combs thoroughly characteristic of his present manner." 3

in her book on gems and jewelry, marilena mosco says, "Lucien Gaillard, who exhibited for the first time in 1902, was the most "Japanese" of the Parisian jewelers.

"Monsieur Lucien Gaillard has always been seduced by the art of the Japanese and is highly interested in the mystery of their work. One of his merits is the instantaneous legibility: clear, sharp and the pureness, of his designs.

Copying faithfully the shapes and lines of Nature, synthesizing them but not falsifying them, he achieves in his creations a sober simplicity." 4

full of grace

HOUSE SPARROWS

for Joe and U. T. Summers

Not of the wealthy, Coral Gables class
Of traveler, nor that rarified tax bracket,
These birds weathered the brutal, wind-chill facts
Under our eaves,
nesting in withered grass,
Wormless but hopeful,
and now their voice enacts
Forsythian spring with primavernal racket.

Their color is the elderly, moleskin gray
Of doggedness, of mist, magnolia bark.
Salt of the earth, they are;
the common clay;
Meek emigres come over on the Ark
In steerage from the
Old Country of the Drowned
To settle down along Long Island Sound,

Flatbush, Weehawken,
our brownstone tenements,
Wherever the local idiom is Cheep.
Savers of string, meticulous and mild,
They are given to nervous flight,
the troubled sleep
Of those who remember terrible events,
The wide-eyed, anxious haste
of the exiled.

Like all the poor, their safety
lies in numbers
And hardihood and anonymity
In a world of dripping browns and
duns and umbers.
They have inherited the lower sky,
Their Lake of Constants,
their blue modality
That they are borne upon
and battered by.

Those little shin-bones,
hollow at the core,
Emaciate finger-joints,
those fleshless wrists,
Wrapped in a wrinkled, loose, rice-paper skin,
As though the harvests of earth had never been,
Where have we seen such
frailty before?
In pictures of Biafra and Auschwitz.

Yet here they are,
these chipper stratoliners,
Unsullen, unresentful,
full of the grace
Of cheerfulness,
who seem to greet all comers
With the wild confidence
of Forty-Niners,
And, to the lively honor of their race,
Rude canticles of "Summers, Summers, Summers."

Anthony Hecht

Copyright © Anthony Hecht

Copyright © 2009 Ploughshares

life is but a dream

NIGHT ON THE GREAT RIVER

Meng Hao-jan

Translated by Gary Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth and William Carlos Williams

I

Steering my little boat
towards a misty islet,
I watch the sun descend
while my sorrows grow:
In the vast night the sky hangs lower than the treetops,
But in the blue lake the moon is coming close.

translated by William Carlos Williams

II

Night on the Great River

We anchor the boat alongside a hazy island.
As the sun sets I am
overwhelmed with nostalgia.
The plain stretches away without limit.
The sky is just above the tree tops.
The river flows quietly by.
The moon comes down amongst men.

translated by Kenneth Rexroth

III

Mooring on Chien-te River

The boat rocks at anchor
by the misty island Sunset,
my loneliness comes again.
In these vast wilds the sky arches down to the trees.
In the clear river water, the moon draws near.

translated by Gary Snyder

Row, row, row your boat,

Gently down the stream.





Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,




Life is but a dream. 1

roadies

We're on the one road, sharing the one load
We're on the road to God knows where
We're on the one road,
it may be the wrong road
But we're together now who cares?
Northmen, Southmen, comrades all!
Dublin, Belfast, Cork or Donegal!
We're on the one road, swinging along, singin' a soldier's song!

Though we've had our troubles now and then
Now's the time to make them up again
Sure aren't we all Irish anyhow?
Now is the time to step together now

We're on the one road,
sharing the one load
We're on the road to God knows where
We're on the one road,
it may be the wrong road
But we're together now who cares?
Northmen, Southmen, comrades all!
Dublin, Belfast, Cork or Donegal!
We're on the one road, swinging along, singin' a soldier's song!

Tinker, tailor ­ every mother's son
Butcher, baker ­ shouldering his gun
Rich man, poor man ­ every man in line
All together, just like Auld Lang Syne!

We're on the one road,
sharing the one load
We're on the road to God knows where
We're on the one road,
it may be the wrong road
But we're together now who cares?
Northmen, Southmen, comrades all!
Dublin, Belfast, Cork or Donegal!
We're on the one road, swinging along, singin' a soldier's song!

Night is darkness just before the dawn
From dissensions, Ireland is reborn
Soon, will all United Irishmen
Make our land a Nation Once Again!

We're on the one road,
sharing the one load
We're on the road to
God knows where
We're on the one road,
it may be the wrong road
But we're together now
who cares?
Northmen, Southmen,
comrades all!
Dublin, Belfast, Cork or Donegal!
We're on the one road, swinging along, singin' a soldier's song! 1

I'd been poring over maps of the United States in Paterson for months, even reading books about the pioneers and savoring names like Platte and Cimarron and so on, and on the road-map was one long red line called Route 6 that led from the tip of Cape Cod clear to Ely, Nevada, and there dipped down to Los Angeles.

I'll just stay on all the way to Ely, I said to myself and confidently started. To get to 6 I had to go up to Bear Mountain. Filled with dreams of what I'd do in Chicago, in Denver, and then finally in San Fran, I took the Seventh Avenue Subway to the end of the line at 242nd Street, and there took a trolley into Yonkers; in downtown Yonkers I transferred to an outgoing trolley and went to the city limits on the east bank of the Hudson River.

If you drop a rose in the Hudson River at its mysterious source in the Adirondacks, think of all the places it journeys as it goes to sea forever -- think of that wonderful Hudson Valley. I started hitching up the thing. Five scattered rides took me to the desired Bear Mountain Bridge, where Route 6 arched in from New England. It began to rain in torrents when I was let off there. It was mountainous. Route 6 came over the river, wound around a traffic circle, and disappeared into the wilderness. Not only was there no traffic but the rain come down in buckets and I had no shelter. I had to run under some pines to take cover; this did no good; I began crying and swearing and socking myself on the head for being such a damn fool.

I was forty miles north of New York; all the way up I'd been worried about the fact that on this, my big opening day, I was only moving north instead of the so-longed for west. Now I was stuck on my northermost hangup. I ran a quarter-mile to an abandoned cute English-style filling station and stood under the dripping eaves. High up over my head the great hairy Bear Mountain sent down thunderclaps that put the fear of God in me. All I could see were smoky trees and dismal wilderness rising to the skies. "What the hell am I doing up here?" 2

(don't miss clive christy's blog to find another blogger who loves prints as much as i do. a continuing source of inspiration and, in the case of this post, image.)

in summer's eyes

1805

.さし汐も朝はうれしやとぶ乙鳥
sashishio mo asa wa ureshi ya tobu tsubame

high tide
and a happy morning...
swallows flying

1806

.蓮の花燕はとしのよらぬ也
hasu [no] hana tsubame wa toshi no yoranu nari

among lotus blossoms
the swallows don't
grow old

1807

.巣乙鳥の目を放さぬや暮の空
su tsubame no me wo hanasanu ya kure no sora

baby swallows in the nest--
eyes glued
on the evening sky

1807

.山里は乙鳥の声も祝ふ也
yama-zato wa tsubame no koe mo iwau nari

mountain village--
even the swallows sing
in celebration

1814

.乙鳥よ是はそなたが桃の花
tsubakura yo kore wa sonata ga momo no hana

swallows--
these peach blossoms belong
to you

david lanoue is who does so many of the wonderful issa translations i feature here, often with his commentary. just wanted to say thanks, david.